Managing contacts and keeping data tidy in our CRM always feels like a game of whack-a-mole. No matter how often we try to clean things up, duplicates and messy data creep back in.
Just curious, do you take time to regularly clean your data? Do you handle it internally or use any helpful tools?
As our team is relatively new to using a CRM, we want to stay on top of keeping the data clean but don’t always have the bandwidth.
What’s your strategy for keeping information clean and usable in your system?
Or do you even have this same problem in the first place? Thanks in advance!
It depends on the business. I know some businesses would manually enter the details, or they use a particular input source to get the contacts entered into the CRM. Others would have Order Forms, Web Forms, API Integrations in place that would add contacts.
You will never get a 100% clean database. I have seen people use different Email Addresses, which in turn leads to duplicate records being created. How easy would it be to spot those people?
It is going to be regular job to make sure your data is clean. Make sure your Web Forms are looking up by Email Address. Use the Admin Duplicate Report to spot duplicates.
If you are being bombarded with Spam Bots, there is 3rd Party Tools that can reduce and flag up spam Contact Records. But I would not guarantee 100% success rate.
One big hindrance to duplicates in Keap is the fact that it only works on email address as the key differentiator. We have found that quite often our clients get caught with duplicates due to people using different emails, but the same phone.
We have used Make to set up a process to deduplicate via phone number, too. It has really helped us and our clients keep their systems cleaned up.
The other thing you can do is to routinely review your email engagement rates. Those that don’t engage should be removed. This can be automated through Make, or you can just run the ‘engagement report’ periodically to see who is engaging.